This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. There are a number of things I'd like to speak about this morning. Can you hear me okay in the back? Good. The first one is the amygdala. For those of you not familiar, that's spelled A- D-A-L-A.

[01:04]

Amygdala. The amygdala is an organ of the brain. Small. Just one or two centimeters in size. Just, you know, like that. But... has powerful influence on our emotional life and our behavior. I see some cyclists here in the group listening, and I also am a cyclist a little bit, and I bike in to work in San Francisco, usually three or four days a week. And on the way in, I listen to a book, an audio book, something like that.

[02:13]

On the way home, I listen to music instead. And the book that I'm listening to now is called Behave. And it's about behavior. written by a man named Robert Sapolsky. And his stated goal in writing the book is to try to understand, as he says, our best and worst behaviors. With a particular... or a particular view toward aggression and violence, which often come together. And, of course, we have to be very careful about context, but among our worst behaviors

[03:29]

is aggression. Context is important. Unmerited aggression. Unmerited violence. Mistaken, misdirected, wrong-headed aggression and violence. the seat of aggression in the brain, the neurological seat of aggression, is the amygdala. So, you know, in animal experiments and also when it's done on human animals in, you know, laboratory conditions, when aggressive impulses are activated, that part of the brain This little organ of the brain is just firing out through its neurons and synapses and so on and so on.

[04:38]

So to understand aggression, human aggression, useful to understand the amygdala. The amygdala is also... I do like to say the word, amygdala. You know, it's one of those Latin words, you know, amygdala. The amygdala also, it turns out, is the... the neurological location, again, it's all very complicated and there's a lot of other moving parts, as it were, but the amygdala is significantly implicated in fear when we're afraid.

[05:45]

Fear and its cousins, anxiety, insecurity, Again, through neuroimaging, they see that when we're afraid, that's the part of the brain. That's one of the parts of the brain that's very active. So fear, aggression. Fear and aggression are connected right there in that little thing there. now this is proven scientifically. Of course, in a sense, this is human knowledge. We knew this before MRIs, right?

[06:52]

We knew that, oh, when somebody's afraid, a likely thing, one likely path that they may go down is to become angry. aggressive and even violent. When we're afraid, and sometimes this direction causes great harm, big problems. big problems for ourself, big problems for others. So the connection between fear and aggression is not all bad.

[07:56]

It has a very reputable evolutionary basis. You know, if there's a saber-toothed tiger walking out in front of the opening of the cave that you live in 60,000 years ago. Does anyone know when saber-toothed tigers lived? Was it 60,000 years ago? 20,000 years ago? 80,000? 150? Some large number of years ago. If the saber-toothed tiger is... That's a tiger with very large teeth. Very large... How do these call it? Incisors? Because they like to incise into human flesh, I think. So if there's a saber-toothed tiger walking out in front of your doorway, the appropriate thing to do is to be terrified.

[08:56]

This is appropriate. And it's also appropriate in that terrified reaction to mobilize... so that you can defend oneself and loved ones. So this is appropriate. This is the way things should be. But it's not so simple. But there's this tremendous possibility, this tremendous... Unfortunate? I don't know if it's unfortunate or not. In some ways, unfortunate possibility that the mechanism or the way it goes gets all mixed up, confused. And we become frightened about what shouldn't be frightening. And we become aggressive toward those who shouldn't be aggressed upon.

[10:01]

So, one of the, so to speak, inspirations, it's not very inspiring, so to speak, but one of the reasons why I'm talking about all of this is my own response to the national... political, societal, cultural situation that we find ourselves in nowadays. When driven pause, yes, it's very complicated, many things going on, but partly, significantly, importantly, driven by fear, aggression, hatred, harm, are prevalent, is the word that occurs to me.

[11:29]

Now, some of us would say, hey, glad you woke up. This has been going on for a long time, not just the last couple of years. And I appreciate that point, that critique. And yet I also feel like there is a particularly virulent strain of this. that is in resurgence. A few weeks ago, are you familiar with ICE, I-C-E? That's the Immigration Customs Enforcement Agency.

[12:31]

So there's an ICE, there was, I think they've closed recently, but there was an ICE detention facility in Richmond across the bay. And there's an organization that does a monthly vigil at the ICE detention facility. What is the vigil? The vigil is... vigil is action the vigil is hopefully some way to calm down the amygdalas of the folks some folks who may be acting in harmful ways to witness

[13:33]

So Green Gulch was invited to host the vigil a couple of weeks ago, the monthly vigil. Green Gulch was invited to host. And I was not able to, I didn't, I was not participating. I didn't go. that day, but I heard about it. And as usual, of course, we sat zazen. That's what we always do in response. In response basically to everything is sit zazen. The case could be made for that. So we sat zazen, but also some people spoke. One of the people who spoke was Zen Center's central abbess, agent Linda Ruth Cutts.

[14:39]

And one of the things that she said was when things go wrong, she didn't say this part. I'm abbreviating. when things go wrong in the way that I'm talking about, she said, compassion is abandoned and suffering and the causes of suffering are increased. So that's what we're up against. Oh. And, of course, let's not forget, I can talk about, we can talk about aggression and violence, misdirected, misappropriated, misgiven to the wrong person.

[15:54]

But also, that's the outside. But then also, it's inside. When we're afraid, we tighten up. That's an inside thing, right? Even the gestures that I'm doing are, you know, you want to fight. It's tight, mobilized. That's inside. That... that narrowness, that constriction is the opposite of big mind, open mind, beginner's mind. violence and its connection with fear.

[17:14]

And I want to talk about this in the context of the Heart Sutra. So we chant the Heart Sutra. The Heart Sutra was written at around the turn of the common era. about 2,000 years ago. Is that how long it was? Yeah. And the Heart Sutra is very popular in Zen places. We chant it here every morning. I was here this morning when we were chanting it, and there were some other folks here, and it looked like, I mean, I wasn't examining the situation, but it looked like It was their first time. So they didn't have any idea what was going on, bowing, chanting, doing all kinds of stuff, talking in ancient Japanese, syllabic stuff and English and so on.

[18:26]

Oh, some of you may feel that way just being here at this Dharma talk, like what is all this stuff? Mumbo jumbo. Many years ago, I took the bus in San Francisco And I was on the bus, and this person said to me, oh, you're from Zen Center. I said, yeah, yeah, uh-huh. And he said, oh, there's a lot of rigor at Zen Center, very rigorous. I said, well, that's good. I hope there's rigor, but not too much rigmarole. So it may look like rigmarole, but it doesn't feel that way after a while. Anyway, so we chant the Heart Sutra each morning here. And in fact, in Zen practice places throughout the world, that's the main one. The Heart Sutra is chanted. The Heart Sutra, some of you may be familiar with it somewhat.

[19:26]

It's the one that has all of those negatives in it. No this, no that, no body, no mind, no thought, no... Lots of no, no, no, no, no. Thank you very much. No eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no receptacles of senses, no sight, no things to see, etc., etc. It keeps on going on like that, which I hope to get to shortly. That's the one. So the Heart Sutra... The reason why we chant it every day is because the understanding of the Heart Sutra is the basis, is the basic understanding of our practice. Expresses the basic understanding out of which our practice of meditation and our practice of Zen comes.

[20:26]

And The Heart Sutra specifically addresses our fear and provides not exactly a way out, but a way to work with our fear, a way to live with our fear, a way, so to speak, a way to be afraid. So the thing about the Heart Sutra is that it's an ancient document and, you know, from a culture certainly similar to ours in that it's a human culture but very distant from ours as well. So the language of the Heart Sutra is rather arcane and maybe hard to understand.

[21:34]

So that's part of my intention today. is to tell you about the Heart Sutra in 10 easy lessons. No, that's not it. But to talk about it in a way so that it's actually important. It's actually relevant. It's actually relevant to us, even though it was written 2,000 years ago, to us Americans. in the 21st century, to our behavior, to our life. So I'm going to talk about the part that specifically addresses fear. Here it comes. And it's got some technical language in it, so tell your amygdala, stay calm. It's actually the... I won't get into this too much.

[22:54]

It's actually... I've been listening to this book too much. It's actually the prefrontal cortex that, you know, calms down the amygdala. You know, kind of gives us new information. Anyway, here's the Heart Sutra. So, know this, know that, know this, know that. And... Oh, for example, it says... So there's this teaching called the five skandhas. The five skandhas teaching is that what looks like people, what looks like me is not me. What's me is actually a collection of these five things, namely form, feeling, perception, impulses, and consciousness. You put those five together and you get... Jiryu. You get Steve. You get yourself.

[23:55]

Again, I'm not going to go into detail. But in the Heart Sutra, it says no form, no feeling, no perception, no impulses, no consciousness. That's the kind of thing that the Heart Sutra does. And The last set of no's is the Four Noble Truths. The Four Noble Truths is suffering, cause of suffering, end of suffering, path to the end of suffering. No cause, no suffering, no cause, no cessation, no path, no knowledge, and no attainment. Then, with nothing to attain, A bodhisattva relies on Prajnaparamita. And thus, the mind is without hindrance. Without hindrance, there is no fear.

[25:01]

So it's the last thing there. There is no fear. That's what catches our attention. And that's what I'm focusing on today. the construction of there is no fear. So there's four phrases I've been studying up on this in preparation for this talk, mostly in myself, not reading so much, a little bit. So there's four phrases here. With nothing to attain, that's the first one. A bodhisattva relies on prajnaparamita. And thus, the mind is without hindrance. Without hindrance, there is no fear. These four phrases are, one way of understanding them is causally related, like each one creates the foundation for the next one.

[26:13]

With nothing to attain is the basic thing. And I'm going to talk about each of these shortly. That's the most fundamental. Nothing to attain. Built on nothing to attain, a bodhisattva relies on prajnaparamita. Built on with nothing to attain and a bodhisattva relies on prajnaparamita, the mind is without hindrance. Built on those three, without hindrance, there is no fear. So it's causal in that way. Like, we could almost say, I'm not sure we could say this, but almost like a path of action. First you do this, then you do this, then you do this, then you do this, bingo. There is no fear. Ha ha. So that's one way to understand it.

[27:18]

And then another way to understand it, I felt thinking about this more, is that each one is actually equivalent to the other. There is no fear is the mind is without hindrance. Without hindrance in this context means that the stuff that's hindering our seeing that's blocking our vision, occluding our sight, those things are removed, just like the clouds. Someday we'll be removed here at Green Gulch and we'll see the sun. Just like the clouds coming away and then the sun shines, then you can see what's going on. That is no fear. No fear is that. And similarly, no fear, which is, the mind is without hindrance, the mind is without hindrance, is a bodhisattva relies on prajnaparamita.

[28:27]

A bodhisattva relying on prajnaparamita is nothing to attain. That's what relying on prajnaparamita is, nothing to attain. Not grabbing a hold of stuff. not narrowing our vision and our grasp. So, to translate this into plain English, I'll do it once more in the... form it is again assuming many of you are not familiar with it maybe never heard it before with nothing to attain a bodhisattva relies on prajnaparamita and thus the mind is without hindrance without hindrance there is no fear in plain English this means that

[29:44]

we develop the capacity, the willingness and capacity to meet our life fully. That's no fear. That is no fear. the willingness and capacity to meet our life. We develop that willingness and capacity by, again, kind of taking away, that's the metaphor, taking away our ability, taking away that which clouds our ability to see things as they are.

[31:03]

A bodhisattva relies on Prajnaparamita means a practitioner, means you are means me relying on seeing who we really are. Who we really are. Not this little narrow little thing. Not narrow and not separate it. seeing who we are. And we're able to do that when we're not busy grabbing a hold of stuff that's nothing to attain. Or not even grabbing a hold of stuff when we're not busy getting caught by things, caught by our ideas, caught by our

[32:15]

caught by our emotional life. That's our project. That's a big project. So, you know, The end point is, there is no fear, which sounds like that's a big project. It sounds, to me, that sounds very elevated, difficult, distant. No fear? Boy, oh boy. that ain't me, that could never be me, is the way generally I feel about it.

[33:23]

But, oh, and how you may feel about it also. So I think it's, I think it's, there are many things like this where a certain, in Buddhist practice, maybe we could say in religious practice or in literature, things are, talked about at a certain extreme but then the actual living out of them is not so extreme so we could say well maybe someday okay no fear but anything in that direction is good just moving in that direction is a good direction to move in even if we're a thousand miles away and we move one step we're closer that's good So what I'm trying to convey is that this is not some elevated, distant thing that you'll never be able to get to. This is what we do all the time. This is just our daily life.

[34:27]

We can approach it in our daily life. That's why we call it practice. We call it practice. We're practicing it. And the inspiration of our practice is to practice. Funnily enough, the inspiration is not to get there, wherever there may be, called no fear, called unparalleled perfect enlightenment, called something else. That's not the heart of our practice. The heart of our practice is practice. and I was thinking about practice and like practicing the piano that I'm playing the piano these days and I practice the piano but in the case so it may be different because when I'm practicing the piano I'm trying to get it so that I can play the piece without any mistakes right

[35:47]

trying to get it right. But the feeling of practice in Zen is not trying to get it right. It is trying to get it right, but we make our home in practice. We don't think, oh, gee, if it's not right, then it's no good. We don't value the final product as much. We value the practice. That's what a bodhisattva is. A bodhisattva is somebody who's on their way to perfect Buddhahood. But we never get there. We're always on the way. On the way and in the way. And sometimes we get in our way of being in the way. Besides... So we make our home in the effort of, with nothing to attain, relying on Prajnaparamita, removing our hindrances, seeing clearly.

[37:17]

So let me say a little bit about Prajnaparamita, what that means, perfection of wisdom. That's what it means in English. Prajnaparamita is wisdom and paramita means like perfect or sometimes we say wisdom gone beyond. Perfect means does not mean perfect like without any flaws. That's one kind of perfect. Something as perfect is like no flaws to it. That's not the perfect we're talking about. Perfect etymologically comes from complete. So the perfection of wisdom really means the completion of our wisdom. It really means filling it out so it's really full and complete, not partial.

[38:33]

That's what the Heart Sutra is about. So, you know, that list of know this, know that, know this, know that, that I was talking about, all of the things that come after the know were concepts of Buddhist teaching. like the five skandhas that I mentioned, the five aggregates that I mentioned, and the four double truths. Those were all things that were developed as concepts in Buddhism as a way to free people from their karmic entanglements. But, as it turns out, so to speak, no surprise, those very things became future, became karmic entanglements themselves, became things that we got stuck in ourselves already. So the people who wrote the Heart Sutra, I was thinking, I was wondering if the people who wrote the Heart Sutra were like young people, you know?

[39:43]

They might have been young people or young at heart, as they say. They might have been young people because it was like... Oh, these old cronies, they just got all this teaching. They're all wrong, you know, and we know what's going on, you know. Young people have such a wonderful spirit of being young and being, you know, we're not going to be stuck in this old stuff that these old people are stuck in. I don't know if it was written by young people or not. Probably not. But anyway... What they're trying to say, what the folks who wrote the Heart Sutra are trying to say is, don't be caught by these things either. Don't be caught by form, feelings, perceptions, impulses, consciousness. Don't be caught by suffering, cause, cessation, etc., etc. Don't be caught by those. Kaz Tanahashi, Kazuaki Tanahashi is not a young person.

[40:53]

an older person who is nevertheless a very fresh, brilliant kind of contemporary translator of Buddhist texts. And actually he's worked with Zen Center teachers for 40 years translating many Buddhist texts. And I just happened to see his translation of the Heart Sutra. And kind of brilliantly, Every place that there's a no in the usual translation, he puts freedom from. Freedom from I. Freedom from ear, nose, tongue, body, mind. Freedom from the five skandhas. Freedom from any entrapment. Let's see, there was something else I was going to say here about that freedom from and the Heart Sutra.

[42:06]

Maybe it'll occur to me later. So, I was hoping to speak about each one of these four parts of this statement in the Heart Sutra, one by one, briefly. The foundation is with nothing to attain. And in the sense that they're all, these four things are all equivalent, in a certain sense we could say, that's enough. That's enough teaching for us. With nothing to attain. Those four words. That's enough teaching for us for this lifetime. Maybe a few more after this.

[43:39]

We'll see. With nothing to attain already is very important. Technically, what the writers of the Heart Sutra meant by with nothing to attain, they were referring to high spiritual attainments, high meditative attainments. And they were saying, No, the emphasis is not on attaining high spiritual attainments. The emphasis is on actually practicing, actually working with our lives now, with what we have now and here. So they were talking about these elevated attainments, but I think we can apply it more widely as well. Any attainment, anything we're holding on to, anything that we're grasping, is the attainment that we should, with nothing to attain, the attainment that we should let go of.

[44:52]

Dogen a Zen ancestor, a very highly esteemed Zen ancestor, was a prolific writer, and one of the things that he wrote is called the Bodhisattva's Four Methods of Guidance. The methods of guidance of a practitioner for guiding others and guiding oneself. The four methods of guidance are giving, kind speech, beneficial action, identity action. This is the opposite of amygdala activation, an action from amygdala activation.

[46:18]

In a characteristic way that Dogen talks about things, in this bodhisattvas, the four... what did I just say, four guiding principles, Bodhisattva's four methods of guidance, in this four methods of guidance, Dogen says, when you leave the way to the way, you attain the way. When At the time of attaining the way, the way is always left to the way. For those of you familiar with it, this is characteristic of the way that Dogen expresses himself, which is, you might say, somewhat hard to understand.

[47:25]

When you leave the way to the way, you attain the way. At the time, how does it go? At the time of attaining the way, the way is always left to the way. How I understand this means, don't worry about the way. Don't worry about the goal. Don't worry about Anuttara, Samyak, Sambodhi. Don't worry about right and perfect enlightenment. Let the way take care of the way. When you leave the way to the way, just leave the way to the way. Don't bother with it. Don't think about it. That's attaining the way. At the time of attaining the way, the way is always left to the way.

[48:32]

independent of our efforts. It's like the sun and the moon. They'll come out in the sky. We don't have to worry about those. Just take care of what we're doing. Take care of what I'm doing. So, Suzuki Roshi said, Make your best effort. That was one of his, he had certain phrases that were favorites of his. Make your best effort. He didn't say it, but in the way that I'm speaking about it now, make your best effort means that's it. It's not make your best effort in order to. It's not make your best effort because something is going to happen.

[49:41]

Just make your best effort now. And make your best effort has to do with nothing to attain. Because it's not about attaining. It's not about attaining. some elevated spiritual meditative state. It's not about attaining high-priced real estate. It's not about attaining anything. The focus is on our activity now. Which means... that it's always available. No matter what, our practice, this practice, this effort, this effort that we can always make our best effort, is always available.

[50:49]

It's available now, and if we don't do it, then rather than spending a lot of time castigating oneself for not doing what one should be doing, there's the opportunity to do it now. At Tassajara, I was working in the kitchen and we were reading something and it said, don't judge the ingredients. Don't judge the ingredients. Sometimes you have good ingredients, sometimes you have not so good ingredients. Your job as a cook is not to judge the ingredients. Just work with the ingredients. That's make your best effort. So then somebody said, which was a great question, OK, but what if I do judge the ingredients? I always like that question because it's, you know, that's us, right?

[51:55]

Not supposed to, but we do. What if you do judge the ingredients? And then somebody else said, don't judge judging the ingredients. It sounds like a trick, but it's actually true. It's actually so. That's making your best effort. Because making your best effort means it's a forward practices, a forward-looking activity. It's not about retrospective assessment. Like if you're a Zen student, there's often a lot of retrospective assessment of Zazen. Oh, that was not a good period of Zazen. I was just so distracted. Mostly it's that way, about 99,000 times out of a million. But then occasionally it's, oh, that was a very good period of Zazen.

[53:00]

You know, retrospective assessment, totally beside the point. Practice is practicing now, not retrospectively, not about something that happened in the past. It's always about now, which is a great freedom and a great gift to us. with nothing to attain, a bodhisattva, again, bodhisattva, setting aside many complications, bodhisattva means anyone who has the slightest interest in understanding their life. That's a bodhisattva. That's somebody on the way to being a Buddha.

[54:01]

relies on Prajnaparamita the completion of our wisdom the completion of our wisdom means oh now I remember what it was I was going to say earlier the completion of our wisdom means that instead of the usual limited way that we see things we know that it's limited and not limited that's the perfection of wisdom the perfection of wisdom means it's You need to know that it's Sunday and it's 10 o'clock. It's not 10 o'clock right now. It was 10 o'clock a short while ago. It's useful to know that if you want to hear a Dharma talk at Green Gulch because that's when Dharma talks at Green Gulch happen. It's useful for me to know that because if I'm going to give one, that's when I have to show up, 10 o'clock.

[55:05]

at Green Gulch in the Zendo to give a Dharma talk. Very useful. But of course, there's no such thing as 10 o'clock, right? There's no such thing as Sunday, right? It's limited and it's separate. And as human beings, human beings need, we need to operate that way in limited, separate ways. We need Sundays, 10 o'clock, and all of the rest of it. Otherwise, it would be too confusing. You're like, what time is it? We don't know, right? Shohaku Okamura is fond of speaking about how from the Big Bang, right, which happened a while ago, 13.75 billion years ago, right, approximately, To right now, there's no separation.

[56:10]

There's no boundary, right? It wasn't like we took time out from time. It started then, and it's going till now. It's just one thing. One moment. One gigantic moment. It only looks gigantic to us because we're human beings. To somebody else, it might not look so gigantic. But it's just one thing, and it will keep being that one thing. That's completing our knowledge of time. That's the sense in which it's the perfection of wisdom, the completion of wisdom. And that's the freedom. We have limitations and we're free of those limitations. We have 10 o'clock, but we should know that 10 o'clock, it does not define reality.

[57:20]

Limitation and separation is the other one. Because, of course, 10 o'clock means it's not 10.01, it's not 9.59. It's all separated. And I'm just using time as an example. It's the same thing, though. What is it that's happening now? You're listening to me. What the hell is that? What is listening to me? What is it? You know? Somehow these airs going through these... Chords, right? These are vocal cords making these sounds, creating vibrations in the air that's out there. That's not in me. The air is out there. That's where the vibrations are happening, right? Then they're going into you. They're going into your ears. Sorry. Don't mean to intrude, but there it is inside you. Right? The anvils and the hammers and the other stuff that's going on there.

[58:22]

It's all happening in there. Then it's going to your brain, no less. What is it all about? What is that? For simplicity purposes, for karmic purposes, we say, oh, Steve is talking and people are listening. But there's no separation there. No real separation. I shouldn't say that. It's not limited to separation. It is separate, but it's not separate. So the teaching of Prajnaparamita, the teaching of the perfection of wisdom, is to bring the unlimited, unbounded, unseparated understanding of our life to our attention. And why? Because then it's more likely... that we will be generous, the four methods of guidance, generous, kind speech, beneficent action, identity action.

[59:36]

Or to turn that around, those come from an understanding of how things actually are. Those are the natural result. of understanding how things actually are. And the amygdala activation, the amygdala flare-up comes from a reduced and limited understanding. And when it's seen as the only truth then it can lead to terrible consequences. So probably I've spoken enough this morning. So I'm going to end. And I was going to end with a joke. But I only got the beginning of the joke.

[60:43]

The beginning of the joke is... Amygdala and Prajnaparamita walked into a bar. That's as far as I've gotten. So if you have, if a punchline occurs to you, let me know. But you can't use this one because somebody already mentioned this one to me. Amygdala and Prajnaparamita walked into a bar. The bartender said, what'll you have? Amygdala said, I'm afraid I don't know. Prajnaparamita said, nothing. Don't use that one because that one's already. Somebody thought of that one already. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center.

[61:53]

Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[62:18]

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